Sociology@Warwick Bloghttps://sociologyatwarwick.wordpress.com
Department of Sociology at the University of WarwickSat, 31 Jan 2015 22:42:28 +0000enhourly1http://wordpress.com/https://s2.wp.com/i/buttonw-com.pngSociology@Warwick Bloghttps://sociologyatwarwick.wordpress.com
Inequality in Education: Innovation in Methodshttps://sociologyatwarwick.wordpress.com/2015/01/12/inequality-in-education-innovation-in-methods/
https://sociologyatwarwick.wordpress.com/2015/01/12/inequality-in-education-innovation-in-methods/#commentsMon, 12 Jan 2015 13:26:14 +0000http://sociologyatwarwick.wordpress.com/?p=2313]]>In 2013, PhD students Carli-Rowell and Siobhan Dytham from the Department of Sociology were awarded an ESRC doctoral events grant in order to host a one-day interdisciplinary post-graduate student event. On Wednesday, 12th of November 2014, they held their event in the Wolfson Research Exchange and it was every success. Reflecting on the day, this is what Carli and Siobhan had to say afterwards:

The event was entitled ‘Inequality in Education – Innovation in Methods’ and the conference sought to explore the use of ‘innovative’ research methods in addressing educational inequalities as well as exploring critically the idea of ‘innovation’ – asking what is it, why do it and does it improve our research? The event also sought to provide an opportunity for postgraduate researchers to hear current research within the field as well as affording critical training to students with an interest in innovation within the Social Sciences.

Drafting the proposal
When I received the call for event proposal I knew right away that I wished to host an event on educational inequality. Having met Siobhan one year prior to receiving the call at the British Sociological Associations Education Study Group event ‘Young People’s Educational Identities in Challenging Times’ of which Dr. Nicola Ingram was and is a co-convenor I instantly thought of collaborating with Siobhan. The subsidiary aim of the events grant was to enhance work on individuals PhDs or issues of mutual concern linking two or more PhDs. Thus, it was specified that the conference topic must be close to the areas of the proposers dissertations and that the event should seek to bring together scholars working within that area. It is in this vein that the conference was structured around the themes of inequalities in education and innovation in methods. The title of the event was also of the same name ‘Inequalities in Education: Innovation in Methods’ and reflects our interest in methodological advances within social science research and inequalities within education whether this is within the compulsory education system, special education or within the field of higher education.

Call for papers
The call for student papers was circulated across the UK and promoted via online social media sites such as Facebook and Twitter. In total we received 16 abstract submissions. In total we had five student presenters and keynotes from Professor Melanie Nind (University of Southampton) and Dr. Nicola Ingram (University of Bath). Registration for the event surpassed capacity and so we opened a waiting list. In total we had around 40 delegates attend. Delegates were from across the nation form Kent, Manchester, Keel, London and so on.

The day itself
The day was structured around three themes that arose naturally form the abstracts submitted and selected. The themes were that of ‘Race and Class’ and ‘Innovative Research Methods’ followed by Dr. Nicola Ingram’s keynote ‘Boundary drawing? Experimenting with art to understand identity’, which explored the use of visual methods such as Photoshop self-portraits, self-representational video, plasticine model-making, visual diaries and the uses of working with artists for research purposes. During Nicola’s keynote delegates participated in a 20 minute plasticine model-making interactive activity and ended with a discussion and questions from the audience regarding the use of plasticine model-making to explore identity. The final theme was that of ‘Disability’. The day was drawn to a close by Professor Melanie Nind whose keynote ‘Changing the social relations of research – innovation and orthodoxy’ in which she reflected on ‘innovation’ in relation to the social relations of research and broader moves toward the democratisation of research.

The program of the day was thus:

Theme One: Race and Class
Nadena Doharty – ‘Black History Month programmes and Black History on the National Curriculum: A case study of two state maintained Secondary Schools in England’.
Jessica Heal – ‘Research Methods with CYP to Explore effective teaching in schools serving low incomes communities’.

Theme Three: Disability
Lauran Doak – ‘Multimodal analysis and video ethnography: a promising combination for reaching preverbal participants with autism?’
Jacqui Shepherd- ‘Interviews are not the only fruit: accessing the voice of young people with autism’.
Keynote: Professor Melanie Nind – ‘Changing the social relations of research: innovation and orthodoxy’.

Keynotes
Siobhan and I invited keynotes based on mutual consultation. Dr. Nicola Ingram was invited due to her research which drew upon exercise of model-making in order to explore the identity of working-class educationally successful teenage boys, due to involvement in the Paired Peers project and due to her collaborations with artists within her current work. Nicola is currently a lecturer at Bath University with research interests spanning issues of social class, higher education, gender, masculinity, social justice and Bourdieu. She is currently an investigator on the Paired Peers project; a six year qualitative, longitudinal study of university students and graduate destinations. This study is now in it’s second phase exploring the classed gendered differences in experiences of post-university transitions.

We also invited Professor Melanie Nind to give a keynote at the conference. Her expertise in both inequality in education, particularly in relation to disability, and innovative and inclusive research methods made her an excellent choice. Melanie is Professor of Education at the University of Southampton. She is a co-director of the hub of the ESRC National Centre for Research Methods (NCRM) and she is Co-Editor of the ‘International Journal of Research & Method in Education’ so we were really excited to be able to invite her to speak about innovation and methods at this event.

Special edition of Exchanges, the Warwick Research Journal
At present and as a follow up to the conference Siobhan and I are in contact with editors from Exchanges, the Warwick research journal and we are currently organising a special edition of the journal as a result of the event. The special edition will include articles from our postgraduate presenters on their piece of emerging research and reflections from our keynotes as well as Siobhan and myself. The special edition will be published in April 2015.

Disadvantaged communities around the world are disproportionately burdened by environmental health hazards, and the affected residents have struggled with the challenges of scientific proof demonstrating the risks to health. What are the forces that underpin these inequalities?

With an ERC Starting Grant, urban sociologist Dr Alice Mah will lead an interdisciplinary study into so-called ‘toxic expertise': scientific expertise about the effects of toxic pollution, and the ‘toxic’ way in which this expertise is (mis)used to justify a lack of corporate social responsibility by the petrochemical industry.

The project will examine the claims, debates, and actions within the petrochemical industry to gain an insight into the uneven global politics of oil and energy. The research will form the basis of a new resource to address the problem of ‘information poverty’ with regard to environmental health hazards. This will comprise an interactive web platform about how best to measure and report the health impacts of toxic pollution, in addition to online, crowd- sourced pollution ‘big data’.

]]>https://sociologyatwarwick.wordpress.com/2014/12/18/toxic-expertise-and-environmental-justice/feed/0alexttsmithSturgeon’s making history, but there’s little room for complacency for the Scottish Nationalistshttps://sociologyatwarwick.wordpress.com/2014/11/13/sturgeons-making-history-but-theres-little-room-for-complacency-for-the-scottish-nationalists/
https://sociologyatwarwick.wordpress.com/2014/11/13/sturgeons-making-history-but-theres-little-room-for-complacency-for-the-scottish-nationalists/#commentsThu, 13 Nov 2014 18:00:12 +0000http://sociologyatwarwick.wordpress.com/?p=1810]]>On Saturday, 15 November, 2014, the SNP MSP Nicola Sturgeon will become Scotland’s first ever First Minister. Dr Alexander Smith, a Warwick University sociologist with expertise on Scottish politics and the 2014 independence referendum who has been interviewed regularly about Scottish politics by the BBC and other media outlets throughout the year, offered the following thoughts on this historic day:

An electrifying new chapter now begins for Scotland. Following Alex Salmond’s resignation as both First Minister of Scotland and Leader of the SNP, Nicola Sturgeon – his Deputy First Minister – steps forward and takes on the leadership of her party with its rank and file firmly united behind her.

She makes history as Scotland’s first ever female First Minister while also taking the helm of a party that appears, despite losing September’s referendum on Scottish independence, in the ascendant. Their membership has almost quadrupled in two months while opinion polls suggest strong gains ahead for them at next year’s general election.

This has got Labour campaign strategists badly worried as they seek to head off the threat from the Scottish Nationalists – a threat that looks to them as dangerous and foreboding as that which the Conservatives face from UKIP in the Southeast of England. But the Scottish Labour Party, which should have been the big winner after Scotland voted against separating from the rest of the UK, has devolved into factional warfare following the resignation of its own leader, Johann Lamont.

The contrast between Labour’s leadership woes and what might seem to some to be the coronation of a new SNP leader could not be starker. But there is little room for complacency for the Nationalists. Scottish Labour has few big beasts left with the intelligence, energy or cunning to take on the Nationalists. But Jim Murphy, a former Cabinet Minister under Tony Blair and Gordon Brown, has declared he wants to swap Westminster for Holyrood and become Labour’s next First Minister in Scotland.

Both Nicola Sturgeon and Jim Murphy played central roles on their respective sides of the referendum debate and look likely to lock horns again. The battle for Scottish independence may be over – for now – but the struggle between Labour and the SNP looks set to intensify.

]]>https://sociologyatwarwick.wordpress.com/2014/11/13/sturgeons-making-history-but-theres-little-room-for-complacency-for-the-scottish-nationalists/feed/0alexttsmithA Tale of Two Murders: on extremism, violence and calls for moderation in multicultural Britainhttps://sociologyatwarwick.wordpress.com/2014/05/11/a-tale-of-two-murders-on-extremism-violence-and-calls-for-moderation-in-multicultural-britain/
https://sociologyatwarwick.wordpress.com/2014/05/11/a-tale-of-two-murders-on-extremism-violence-and-calls-for-moderation-in-multicultural-britain/#commentsSun, 11 May 2014 11:05:22 +0000http://sociologyatwarwick.wordpress.com/?p=1795]]>This week, the Department of Sociology at Warwick University hosted a book launch for Sociologies of Moderation: problems of democracy, expertise and the media, edited by Alexander Smith and John Holmwood. The following article recently appeared at Discover Society and introduces the central themes of the volume,, which has been published as part of the Sociological Review’s prestigious monograph series:

As 2013 drew to a close, two trials for murder went before the courts. One case, it could be said, was the mirror image of the other.

On 25 October, a young Ukrainian student named Pavlo Lapshyn was sentenced to forty years for stabbing and killing an 82 year old Muslim man in Small Heath, Birmingham. He was also convicted of planting nail bombs that were powerful enough to kill or maim outside mosques in Walsall, Tipton and Wolverhampton in the West Midlands.

Lapshyn had arrived in the UK just five days before killing Mohammed Saleem on 29 April 2013, hoping to ignite a race war. Following his arrest, police asked him why he had targeted mosques. ‘Because they are not white,’ he told them, ‘and I am white.’

Lapshyn’s crimes were committed in the weeks before the murder of Drummer Lee Rigby. On 22 May, the young soldier was killed with a machete on a Woolwich street in south-east London by two men who turned out to be converts to Islam. They were arrested at the scene minutes later after confessing to witnesses who had recorded the crime on their mobile phones. The two men – Michael Adebolajo and Michael Adebowale – were convicted of murder on 19 December.

These crimes demonstrate that the threat of racist violence continues to exist in the UK today, both from so-called ‘homegrown’ Islamic militants antagonistic towards the white majority as well as from white supremacists, on occasion having travelled from mainland Europe, towards ethnic minorities.

However, what proved controversial at the time was what seemed to some a disproportionate response from the police and, especially, the Government and the media to both murders, which occurred within a month of each other.

Three hours after Lee Rigby’s killing, Prime Minister David Cameron, who was travelling outside the UK, tweeted to say that he had asked the Home Secretary, Theresa May, to chair a Cobra meeting, bringing together ministers, civil servants, police and intelligence officers to co-ordinate a response to the attack in Woolwich.

This was in contrast to the murder of Mohammed Saleem just a few weeks before and the attempted bombings of West Midlands mosques that followed, which failed to provoke much of a political response from national government. Understandably, this left some Muslim community leaders questioning whether a double standard applies in modern, multicultural Britain when it comes to addressing the threat of racist violence and even terrorism.

It is important to acknowledge the legitimacy of these concerns as well as the sacrifices made by British Muslims like Mohammed Saleem, his family and the community to which he belonged.

But while often clear in condemning extremist violence, our political leaders and the media have had much less to say about what constitutes that ancient virtue so necessary for effectively combating it in pluralist liberal democracies: moderation.

With a tendency to be defined by a sense of what it is not – by its apparent absence of ideology – moderation has come to be associated with ‘bland’ and incoherent notions of centrism in recent years. By definition, moderation seems a relative term, often seeming only momentarily discernable in contrast to fundamentalism and militancy in specific socio-political contexts.

The challenge, though, remains: how to cultivate democratic institutions and publics capable of challenging and checking – moderating, in fact – political and religious extremism in an age defined by growing inequalities, polarization and segregation of local communities.

The anxieties expressed by some Muslim leaders may well have been compounded further by the extensive media coverage that was dramatized further by the calling of the Cobra meeting in response to the attack on Lee Rigby. In the days that followed, several ‘mainstream’ political voices sought to explain his murder not as an isolated violent act but part of a wider problem within Islam. For example, describing the current UK Government’s measures for tackling extremism as ‘reasonable and proportionate’, former Labour Prime Minister Tony Blair argued that the murder had been inspired by a ‘dangerous ideology’ unique to Islam:

‘There is not a problem with Islam . . . But there is a problem within Islam, and we have to put it on the table and be honest about it. There are, of course, Christian extremists and Jewish, Buddhist, and Hindu ones. But I am afraid that the problematic strain within Islam is not the province of a few extremists. It has at its heart a view of religion – and of the relationship between religion and politics – that is not compatible with pluralistic, liberal, open-minded societies. At the extreme end of the spectrum are terrorists, but the worldview goes deeper and wider than it is comfortable for us to admit. So, by and large, we don’t admit it.’

Presented in these terms, Islamic extremism is characterized as a problem for which Muslim communities must take exclusive, sole responsibility. If there is a sociological explanation to be found for Rigby’s murder at all, so Blair’s logic would appear to run, it is nonetheless one for which non-Muslims cannot be held responsible.

In other words, the argument of the former British Prime Minister – and he was not alone in making it – requires minorities to accept that it is they who must ultimately shoulder the burden of responsibility for crimes committed, by extremists, in their name.

The problem here is that in the moment of diagnosing extremism as a fault stemming from one (usually other) minority’s alleged ‘failure’ to fully embrace practices of moderation, Blair and other leaders themselves risk failing a central reflexive test of what makes a moderate. A society’s promise to promote a moderate politics depends significantly on the (political) majority’s willingness to moderate itself and, first and foremost, recognise the rights and sacrifices of minorities.

The reaction to Rigby’s murder was more predictable, of course, amongst leaders of far Right political parties, with the British National Party blaming ‘mass immigration’ for the murder and the English Defence League (EDL) organizing anti-Muslim protests in London and elsewhere.

But the story of a York mosque that served tea and biscuits to anti-Muslim protestors days after is evocative and perhaps better represents a ‘teachable’ moment for those of us seeking insights about what moderation might mean in the twenty-first century.

According to online BBC news coverage of what took place, the Yorkshire EDL Scarborough Division posted a Facebook message encouraging people to gather for a protest outside the mosque in Bull Lane the Sunday following Rigby’s murder. Six EDL protestors turned up. They confronted over 100 supporters of the mosque, including other faith leaders from the wider community. A conversation ensued and an invitation extended to the EDL protestors to join members of the mosque for tea and biscuits.

With tensions diminishing, the protestors then joined younger members of the mosque for a game of football. Speaking afterwards, the Anglican Archbishop of York Dr John Sentamu observed that ‘tea, biscuits, and football are a great and typically Yorkshire combination when it comes to disarming hostile and extremist views.’ Local Anglican priest Father Tim Jones added:

‘I’ve always known they [the mosque] were intelligent and compassionate people and I think this has demonstrated the extent to which they are people of courage – certainly physical courage and also a high degree of moral courage. I think the world can learn from what happened outside that ramshackle little mosque on Sunday.’

It is difficult to imagine much that is more banal and everyday than tea and biscuits. Yet, this true-life fable captures that elusive quality of spirit that makes moderation so hard to pin down analytically.

It underscores a central concern for moderates and moderation: the regenerative power of attending to social relations and the importance of treating those with whom one might hold vehemently opposed views with enough respect and tolerance to cultivate the most appropriate social conditions for facilitating a new kind of conversation. Here, the promise of moderation lies in its re-articulation as a (self) discipline, a set of practices for engaging divided publics.

There is much grist for the sociological mill in everyday acts like sharing tea and biscuits with those one might initially confront as political strangers. After all, moderation is about the relations among publics and the possibilities of a deep pluralism that is respectful of difference.

Sociology has a special relationship to the idea of the public as mediating the state and the market. But publics are under threat, from mass consumerism, neoliberal economics and political and religious extremism. To counter these threats, sociology has much to contribute to debates about how to re-cast moderation as a set of ethical practices and values for addressing the many economic inequalities and social injustices facing us today.

If the lessons of Lee Rigby’s murder and Pavlo Lapshyn’s crimes are to be learned in 2014, this is a challenge to which sociologists must rise. After all, the future of sociology is tied to the future of publics and the future for each, without revivified social and political practices of moderation, may be bleak.

]]>https://sociologyatwarwick.wordpress.com/2014/05/11/a-tale-of-two-murders-on-extremism-violence-and-calls-for-moderation-in-multicultural-britain/feed/0alexttsmithSociology staff and seminar series featured in new issue of Exchanges: the Warwick Research Journalhttps://sociologyatwarwick.wordpress.com/2014/04/10/sociology-staff-and-seminar-series-featured-in-new-issue-of-exchanges-the-warwick-research-journal/
https://sociologyatwarwick.wordpress.com/2014/04/10/sociology-staff-and-seminar-series-featured-in-new-issue-of-exchanges-the-warwick-research-journal/#commentsThu, 10 Apr 2014 08:57:47 +0000http://sociologyatwarwick.wordpress.com/?p=1791]]>The Department of Sociology at Warwick runs a successful research seminar series during the academic year. In 2013-2014, it was organised by Dr Amy Hinterberger. The series was recently featured in Exchanges: the Warwick Research Journal. This is what Dr Hinterberger had to say about the series:

This year the Department of Sociology at the University of Warwick organised an exciting and lively research seminar series. Speakers featured in the series such as Suzanne Hall (LSE), Jennifer Curtis (Missouri) and Nisha Kapoor (York) asked pressing questions about the changing landscape of contemporary social research. What are the lived realities of allegiance, participation and belonging from the base of a multi-ethnic street in south London? Is love a human right? What can be said of the state of race, or more specifically about the nature of the contemporary state which has declared racism is a relic?

In order to celebrate the recent arrival of seven new sociologists at the University of Warwick, the seminar series also featured the work of new members in the Department. In the newest issue of Exchanges: the Warwick Research Journal, I interviewed Hannah Jones who delivered a research seminar entitled ‘Uncomfortable positions in local government: negotiating cohesion, inequality and change’. The seminar addressed inequalities of power and discrimination at the local government level in the UK. Hannah recently joined the Department in October 2013 as an Assistant Professor having previously worked as a Research Associate at the Open University. The full interview with Hannah Jones is available to read in Exchangeshere.

]]>https://sociologyatwarwick.wordpress.com/2014/04/10/sociology-staff-and-seminar-series-featured-in-new-issue-of-exchanges-the-warwick-research-journal/feed/0alexttsmithThere is a clear disconnect between young people and political institutions: the Electoral Commission’s proposals to boost engagement will not address this problemhttps://sociologyatwarwick.wordpress.com/2014/04/06/there-is-a-clear-disconnect-between-young-people-and-political-institutions-the-electoral-commissions-proposals-to-boost-engagement-will-not-address-this-problem/
https://sociologyatwarwick.wordpress.com/2014/04/06/there-is-a-clear-disconnect-between-young-people-and-political-institutions-the-electoral-commissions-proposals-to-boost-engagement-will-not-address-this-problem/#commentsSun, 06 Apr 2014 09:06:59 +0000http://sociologyatwarwick.wordpress.com/?p=1788]]>Martin Price is based in the Departments of Sociology at the Universities of Manchester and Warwick and is the Project Manager for MYPLACE, a large scale EC-funded project. In this post, which was first published on the LSE British Politics and Policy Blog, he argues that recent Electoral Commission proposals will fail to re-connect young people with Britain’s political institutions:

The Electoral Commission released a report outlining changes, such as same-day voter registration and e-voting, they believe will make citizens more engaged with the democratic process. However, research shows the motivations underlying young people’s participation in political processes is more rooted in people not seeing the point of voting for individuals and institutions rather than not being able to work out how. It would seem to be something of a red herring to pursue the proposed ‘fixed’ when actually the issue is one of hearts and minds, writes Martin Price.

In the news recently, I read coverage of the Electoral Commission’s report on its review of modern voting. The emphasis in this coverage has been on the recommendation that e-voting would would help young voters to engage with the process: “Whether it is the ability to register to vote on the day of the election, or voters being able to use any polling station in their constituency, or the introduction of advance voting, or even more radical options such as e-voting, we plan to look at a variety of options assessing how they will help citizens engage more effectively,” said Jenny Watson, quoted in The Guardian‘s article. I would like to challenge this, and particularly I would like to challenge this report’s notion of what constitutes “engagement.”

My opinion on this topic is heavily influenced by the evidence we found in a project I currently work on. MYPLACE (Memory, Youth, Political Legacy and Civic Engagement) is a major social research project, funded by the European Commission which employs a combination of survey, interview and ethnographic research to provide new empirical data that will not only measure levels of participation but capture the meanings young people attach to it, and thus examine the motivations underlying young people’s participation, in both formal political processes and other forms of social and civic activity.

A core part of the project is measuring young people’s participation using a survey delivered in 14 countries with 17,098 respondents and understanding that participation using 900 in-depth follow up interviews.

In the UK, this work was carried out across two field sites in the West Midlands: one comprising two wards in a multi-cultural regional city, and the other a smaller, relatively ethnically homogenous former industrial town. Across these sites, 1,092 people aged 16-25 completed a detailed face-to-face questionnaire survey, providing an overview ‘synopsis’ of the beliefs, attitudes and values of young people in these locations towards a variety of themes, including political interest, political participation, citizenship, social networks, gender & sexuality, religion, minority groups, understanding of democracy and history and memory. These issues were then explored in 61 semi-structured follow-up interviews with survey respondents.

As part of my remit for non-academic dissemination, I recently prepared a written evidence statement to the Parliamentary Select Committee on Political and Constitutional Reform on just this subject. You can find the full report here and I won’t repeat that analysis in detail.

The findings of our research point to a clear disconnect between young people and political institutions. This is characterised by a breakdown in communication, expressed by one of our respondents:

The language of politics… can be damaging, I think it stops some people from getting involved, if they don’t understand the terminology, I think it can make it quite difficult, for some people, to interact with it.

There was also dissatisfaction with politicians who are referred to in interviews as out of touch, privileged (rich, posh), out for themselves (corrupt, interested in their own wealth and career), hypocritical or not keeping their promises, and ‘not listening to people like us’. Notably, “politics” and “politicians” are almost always conflated. In the survey data, 43% in one research location (the larger regional city) and 47% in the other location (the smaller post-industrial town) state that they disagree (disagree and strongly disagree on a five point Likert scale) with the statement that “Politicians are interested in young people like me”

In another survey question, respondents were asked to rate thirteen institutions in terms of how much they trust them; the army was the most trusted institution, followed by the police and the courts. The media and political parties scored the lowest levels of trust, followed by The Prime Minister and Parliament. Respondents to in-depth interviews often suggested that politicians are ‘out of touch’ with ordinary people. I could go on, and of course I would recommend our research outputs as further reading. In the end though, the crux of my argument is this:

It would seem to be something of a red herring to pursue the idea that the ‘fix’ is technological, when actually the issue is one of hearts and minds. I’m pretty sure most young people could figure out how to vote if they were motivated to do so. The notion that young people aren’t voting because they can’t work out how is quite patronizing, particularly when so much evidence exists to suggest that the issue is more rooted in people not seeing the point of voting for individuals and institutions they see as (at worst) corrupt or (at best) irrelevant. In that context, e-voting seems to me like a pretty superficial way to address a deep-rooted problem.

More disturbingly, it doesn’t seem a huge leap to wonder whether simplifying the process might ultimately mask the problem. It does seem plausible that more people might vote if they could do it from their smartphone on the bus, or by a couple of clicks on links from social media. Would those new voters really have engaged more meaningfully with the democratic process though? In that sense, might we not reasonably conclude that voter numbers in a given demographic are too crude a metric to use if we really want to assess engagement?

]]>https://sociologyatwarwick.wordpress.com/2014/04/06/there-is-a-clear-disconnect-between-young-people-and-political-institutions-the-electoral-commissions-proposals-to-boost-engagement-will-not-address-this-problem/feed/0alexttsmithShould UK scholars boycott Israeli academic institutions? (PART 2)https://sociologyatwarwick.wordpress.com/2014/03/31/should-uk-scholars-boycott-israeli-academic-institutions-part-2/
https://sociologyatwarwick.wordpress.com/2014/03/31/should-uk-scholars-boycott-israeli-academic-institutions-part-2/#commentsMon, 31 Mar 2014 11:24:41 +0000http://sociologyatwarwick.wordpress.com/?p=1782]]>Earlier this month, Warwick Emeritus Professor of Sociology Robert Fine participated in a debate at Leeds University on the provocative topic ‘This house believes that UK academics should boycott Israeli academic institutions until Israel ends the occupation and abides by international law.’ Professor Fine argued against the motion. This is his second and final post outlining what he had to say:

Let us turn to the controversial antisemitism question. We should be able to agree that antisemitism is like any other racism something that progressive movements must be against. In my union, UCU, proponents of an academic boycott of Israel always couple their calls with more or less categorical declarations that criticism of Israel is not or not ‘as such’ antisemitic. Supporters of BDS in the States declare categorically that the charge of ‘antisemitism’, when levelled against them or other critics of Israel, is not only mistaken but also raised for dishonest reasons. I have often heard it said – look for example at Alain Badiou’s recent polemics on antisemitism – that while antisemitism was a real problem in the past, it is no longer a problem of the present and has now been converted into a mere ideology of Zionism. What I see is a disturbing reluctance on the part of proponents of boycott to take seriously the problem of antisemitism. To reduce concern over antisemitism to a way of censoring critical thought about Israel is insulting to those of us who are concerned about antisemitism and have no wish to censor critical thought. We should surely understand by now that it is racism and antisemitism, not opposition to racism and antisemitism, which constitute the restriction of free speech.

Criticism of any country can be racist – whether it is criticism of Zimbabwe on the grounds that Africans cannot rule themselves, or criticism of India on the grounds that Asian values are essentially authoritarian, or criticism of the Arab Spring on the grounds that democracy and human rights are foreign to the Arab mindset, or criticism of Ireland on the grounds that the Irish are not intelligent, or even criticism of apartheid South Africa on the grounds that whites are genetically primed to infantilise Blacks. Criticism of Israel is no exception. It can be antisemitic and it is a moral obligation we ought to honour post-MacPherson to take very seriously the fear that the academic boycott encourages antisemitism because its effect is to exclude Jews and only Jews from the global community of academe.

I am not against all boycotts, but I am against an academic boycott linked to a political doctrine that treats Zionism as a dirty word. Zionism is a kind of nationalism. Like other nationalisms it has many faces – at times socialist, emancipatory, in search of refuge from horror; at other times narrow, chauvinistic, exclusive and terroristic. It depends which face we touch. For most Jews, Zionism simply means commitment to the existence of a Jewish state and is compatible with a plurality of political views. Zionism is not fundamentally different in this respect from other national movements born out of opposition to colonial and racial forms of domination. Most show the same Janus-face. Consider, for example, the ANC’s African nationalism: on the one hand, it has overthrown apartheid and achieved constitutional revolution; on the other, it reveals its own proclivity to authoritarianism, corruption, violence and class politics. The murder of 34 mineworkers at Marikana was only the most visible sign of a new order in which profits are still put before people. What I object to is heaping onto ‘Zionism’ all the wrongs of nationalism in general, as if this nationalism were all bad while other nationalisms are off our critical hook. It is deeply regressive to turn ‘Zionism’ into an abstraction — abstracted from history (the Holocaust in Europe), abstracted from politics (conflict over land with Arab countries and Palestinians), abstracted from society (including the exclusion of most Jews from Middle East and Maghreb societies). It seems to me that there is some line of continuity between the abstraction of ‘Zionism’ today and the abstraction of ‘the Jews’ in the past.

The argument is put forward that Palestinian civil society has called for a blanket boycott of Israeli academic institutions. There is an empirical question concerning how true this is – to the chagrin of BDS this call is not supported by Mahmoud Abbas and the Palestinian Authority – but the more fundamental problem is present in the idea that Palestinian civil society is one homogenous bloc with one opinion. To work on this assumption is to diminish the subjectivity of Palestinians, to deny plurality within the Palestinian people, to attribute to Palestinians a single voice that is in fact an echo of your own voice. Palestinians are certainly victims of Israel but they are not only victims and they are not only victims of Israel. Racism is a versatile beast and I would contend that most Palestinians have no more interest in antisemitism than do Jews. Usually it is fellow Palestinians, not Jews, who are the first and main victims of antisemitic political forces within Palestinian society. The academic boycott offers little tangible support for Palestinian academics.

Israel has a definite political responsibility that goes with its current power, and like many other Jews in Israel and the diaspora I feel a frustrated yearning for Israel to fulfil its responsibilities. However, Israel’s power is relative, not absolute. It looks like Goliath when compared with the Palestinian David, but it looks more like David when compared with other state powers. There is something very disturbing in the totalising images of Zionist power associated with the boycott movement and in the innocent vision of peace and harmony that will prevail once this power is broken. Closer to home this self-same image of Zionist power manifests itself in the repeated refrain of resisting ‘intimidation’ we hear from advocates of the boycott.

Solidarity with Israeli and Palestinian academics should have as its aim the building of trust, the surrender of the occupied territories, the establishment of an independent Palestine alongside the Jewish and other Arab states, and above all the humanisation of all parties. In this spirit I would offer our solidarity to the 165 Israeli academics who support a boycott of Ariel University in the occupied territories and the 11 academic institutions that have publicly condemned giving Ariel university status. The problem with ‘the academic boycott’, however, is that it blocks our ears to points of view we don’t want to hear, or don’t want to admit might exist, or indeed to anything that questions our own self-certainty. It grants us licence to invent what we assume others think, in this case Israeli academics, rather than hear what they actually say. The principle of academic freedom is not absolute but it is something. It contains norms of openness, understanding, inquiry, criticism, self-criticism and dialogue, which we abandon at our peril. In any event, we in Europe must face up to our particular responsibility not to project onto one side or the other all the sins of racism, imperialism, ethnic cleansing and genocide of which Europe itself has been so very guilty. The boycott of Israeli academic institutions is by contrast the tip of a reactive and regressive political turn.

]]>https://sociologyatwarwick.wordpress.com/2014/03/31/should-uk-scholars-boycott-israeli-academic-institutions-part-2/feed/2alexttsmithShould UK scholars boycott Israeli academic institutions? (PART 1)https://sociologyatwarwick.wordpress.com/2014/03/27/should-uk-scholars-boycott-israeli-academic-institutions-part-1/
https://sociologyatwarwick.wordpress.com/2014/03/27/should-uk-scholars-boycott-israeli-academic-institutions-part-1/#commentsThu, 27 Mar 2014 18:51:41 +0000http://sociologyatwarwick.wordpress.com/?p=1778]]>Earlier this month, Warwick Emeritus Professor of Sociology Robert Fine participated in a debate at Leeds University on the provocative topic ‘This house believes that UK academics should boycott Israeli academic institutions until Israel ends the occupation and abides by international law.’ Arguing against the motion and in the first of two posts, this is what Professor Fine had to say:

This is not the first time I have been embroiled in a boycott debate. In the 1980s I was involved in solidarity work with the fledgling independent trade unions in South Africa. They were a living expression of non-racial democracy across so-called national lines. Solidarity included establishing direct links between South African and British unions at official and rank and file levels. As a result of our solidarity activities we were pilloried by leading figures in anti-apartheid, the ANC and the South African Communist Party for breaking the boycott! When we invited a South African academic, a leading advocate of the new unions and anti-apartheid scholar, to speak at our Comparative Labour Studies programme at Warwick University, a demonstration was organised by a couple of SACP stalwarts to prevent him from speaking. When we wrote a trade union solidarity pamphlet, we were told that unions could only be legal in South Africa if they collaborated with the regime and that we were in effect collaborationists.

Beneath the argument about boycott what was also going on was a political battle between a progressive socialist politics and a quite reactionary nationalist politics. It is a battle that has not stopped and is rising to the surface in contemporary South Africa. I grant there is no direct analogy between the boycott of apartheid South Africa and that of Israeli academic institutions, but I contend that a similar political battle is taking place. It is a battle over the future of our own political life.

The normal practice of international solidarity is to make contact with and support individuals and associations that are critical of an oppressive power. Depending on the circumstances, I am thinking of trade unions, women’s movements, community organisations, peasant associations, some religious institutions, human rights activists, individual writers and academics – all who find themselves oppressed by and / or in struggle against oppressive powers. As far as Israeli and Palestinian academics are concerned, we should find ways of speaking to one another more, not less. We can do this in the normal way: by establishing links between our professional and union organisations, supporting campaigns for decent conditions, defending academic freedom and freedom of movement, by facilitating academic links across the national divide, and so forth. A boycott directed at Israeli academic institutions and Israeli academic institutions alone shifts our focus away from international solidarity and toward a refusal to have anything to do with one nationally defined section of our fellow academics.

The academic boycott fails to make a distinction crucial to all radical political thought: that between civil society and the state. The academic boycott punishes a segment of civil society, in this case Israeli universities and their members, for the deeds and misdeeds of the state. The occupation of Palestine and the human rights abuses that flow from the occupation are to my mind simply wrong, but there is something very troubling in holding Israeli universities and academics responsible for this wrong. Israeli academics doubtless hold many different political views, just as we academics do in the UK, but the principle of collective responsibility applied to Israeli academe as a whole sends us down a slippery path. The motion calls for Israel – and I would hope all other parties to conflict in the Middle East – to abide by international law, but the essential point of international law is to get away from categories of collective guilt and affix personal and political responsibility where it is merited. It is wrong to hold academic institutions and academics responsible for the actions of the Israeli state – even if many of the universities in question are, like most British academic institutions, rather lacking in political bottle.

It is as discriminatory to boycott any academic institutions or any academics on the basis of nationality, as it would be to boycott on the basis of race, religion or gender. This would be true not only of Israel but of any other country. It is wrong to penalise academics because of the nation to which they or their universities belong. It is also discriminatory to impose a political test that academics of one particular nation must pass in order to be allowed to speak and work with us – as if we are arbiters of all that is allowed to pass muster. Worst of all, I am sure we would agree, would be to base a decision to boycott or not to boycott Israeli academics on whether they are deemed Jewish, Arab or Muslim, but the cases I know of actual boycott have been directed against Jewish Israeli academics.

A selective academic boycott aimed only at Israeli academic institutions and not at universities and research institutes belonging to other countries with equally bad or far worse records of human rights abuse, is also discriminatory. I admit that the wrongs done by ‘my own people’, in this case fellow Jews, grieve me more than the wrongs done by other peoples, but this is a confession, not a principle of political action. An academic boycott directed exclusively at Israeli academic institutions generates a quite realistic sense that Israel is being picked on – not because it is different from other countries but because it is the same. Given the slaughter currently occurring in Syria, including that of Palestinian refugees, given the repression currently imposed by the military government in Egypt, given the slave-like conditions currently endured by migrant workers in Qatar, it is increasingly eccentric to select Israel alone for boycott. This is not to say that the Israeli occupation should be normalised, certainly not, but it is all too easy to hold some other category of people, the larger and the further away the better, as the embodiment of absolute culpability.

The absence of good reasons to boycott Israeli academic institutions has led to ever more wild and hyperbolic depictions of Israel itself. Pascal once said: if first you kneel, then you will pray. Marx translated this aphorism into the notion that being determines consciousness. In this case, those who call for an academic boycott of Israel end up offering increasingly Manichaean images of Israel’s evil essence in order to justify their practice. We are told that Israel is just like the apartheid state in South Africa, that Israel treats Palestinians just like Nazis treated Jews, that Gaza is just like the Warsaw ghetto, that the Israel lobby controls American foreign policy just like antisemites used to say that the Jewish lobby controlled the nations of Europe, that Zionism is responsible for all that is wrong in Palestine or the Middle East or the world. The existence of these projections of course preceded the boycott, but the boycott encourages us to search everywhere for evidence of Israel’s criminality that will then justify the boycott itself.

]]>https://sociologyatwarwick.wordpress.com/2014/03/27/should-uk-scholars-boycott-israeli-academic-institutions-part-1/feed/1alexttsmithDangerous Laughter: The (Not So Innocent) Mocking of Gender Studies in Academiahttps://sociologyatwarwick.wordpress.com/2014/03/21/dangerous-laughter-the-not-so-innocent-mocking-of-gender-studies-in-academia/
https://sociologyatwarwick.wordpress.com/2014/03/21/dangerous-laughter-the-not-so-innocent-mocking-of-gender-studies-in-academia/#commentsFri, 21 Mar 2014 10:57:01 +0000http://sociologyatwarwick.wordpress.com/?p=1776]]>Gender Studies is an increasingly established and influential area of study and research, however, it continues to be the object of sustained mocking within (and beyond) academia. This allegedly ‘innocent teasing’ has significant and negative effects, says Warwick sociologist Maria do Mar Pereira in a Blogpost that reprises her contribution to openDemocracy for International Women’s Day last year.

During the last decades and in several countries, there has been significant growth in the numbers of Women’s and Gender Studies (WGS) scholars, departments, programmes, journals, books and conferences. It is now an established and vibrant field of knowledge production, making significant contributions to our understanding of how societies’ norms about gender shape the experiences and identities of women and men, constrain the opportunities and resources that each can access, and continue to produce pervasive and damaging forms of gender inequality on a range of levels.

The field’s contributions to the advancement of knowledge (and to progressive social transformation) are numerous and undeniable; and yet, since its inception it has had to deal with a constant and persistent questioning within (and also outside) academia – is WGS really ‘proper’ knowledge?

In 1973, the influential feminist author Adrienne Rich wrote that in the US ‘women’s studies are [considered] a “fad”; (…) feminist teachers are “unscholarly,” “unprofessional,” or “dykes”’. More recent analyses of the status of the field indicate that WGS continues to be seen as less credible or relevant than other academic disciplines. Studies have shown that WGS is perceived by many scholars and students as too ‘trivial’, not very academically demanding and too ‘soft’, or nothing more than consciousness-raising. WGS scholars with dazzling CVs and best-selling books report being dismissed by colleagues as not properly qualified or academically sound, and hence not worth reading or quoting. This dismissal of WGS occurs in different ways and degrees in each country, discipline or institution, but the overall picture is a clear one: WGS is not always taken seriously and this limits the opportunities for the study of gender and has a detrimental impact on WGS scholars’ career progression and access to funding and publishing opportunities.

If one considers only the claims made about WGS in public spaces and official speeches or documents, such an assessment of the situation may seem harsh and disproportionate. Indeed, most contemporary universities describe themselves as spaces of equality and of open and diverse academic inquiry, and in many Western academic communities explicit and unequivocal public denigration of WGS has become rarer and less acceptable (although it regularly surfaces in the media in the declarations of religious authorities, politiciansand other public figures). And yet, this public climate of openness does not always match what happens in university ‘corridor life’, as I discovered in a recent study.

Through ethnographic observation of academic work and interaction in Portugal and the UK, and interviews 35 scholars working within and outside WGS, I found that claims that WGS is not proper knowledge are frequently made informally and in humorous tone, creating what one of my interviewees called a ‘culture of teasing’ around WGS. A senior WGS scholar explained to me that ‘colleagues will sometimes make teasing remarks and laugh at me and my colleagues. Feminism is seen as something which is ridiculous, something that is laughable, that does not have academic quality.’ Scholars in other institutions reported very similar experiences. One junior scholar in another institution told me: ‘My colleagues make jokes about our Gender Studies degree all the time. Whenever I invite a Gender Studies scholar to speak at a seminar, one of them says “there comes another one of your feminist friends. I wonder if she shaved?”. He’ll describe this as just a joke, nothing to take seriously, just innocent teasing, but this shows that they attribute less importance and value to Gender Studies than to other fields, which are never the butt of these kinds of jokes.’

This interviewee notes that the teasing is often described as ‘nothing to take seriously’. This is a recurring feature of this culture of teasing across institutions, and one that I and other authors would argue plays an important role. The social psychologist Michael Billig has noted that the disclaimer that one is ‘just joking’ can enable the making of problematic or offensive claims that sidestep criticism and accountability. ‘A “friendly tease” seems to deny hostility. (…) The rhetoric (…) can be used to dissipate the negatives, like an air-spray freshening up a bathroom. (…) [It is a] “Tease-Spray”. Just squirt on your own humorous talk, and (…) nasty, critical names will become undetectable’, he wrote in his book Laughter and Ridicule: Towards a Social Critique of Humour, published in 2005. This culture of (so-called innocent) teasing means that even when it is formally institutionalised as an equal field, WGS can be invested with a halo of unscientificity, lack of credibility and ridiculousness that works to position it as inferior to supposedly more serious fields.

Laughter and humour is also used in public to dismiss feminism. While conducting this research project, I attended a lecture for an undergraduate social science course in a British university and listened to a non-WGS lecturer describe a range of theories put forward to explain a particular social phenomenon. At the very end, he mentioned WGS approaches. These are approaches which have been recognised by many scholars as indispensable for a full understanding of the nature and effects of the phenomenon in question; however, that was not how they were presented. One Powerpoint slide summarised how WGS scholars theorise this phenomenon; the next slide had the title ‘Maybe, but…’ and offered two points that framed those theories as limited and easily dismissible. Each point was introduced with a sexist and heteronormative joke that elicited much laughter from the students.

The lecturer’s jokes work to portray WGS as risible, something that the students should not take too seriously, in contrast to the other approaches mentioned, all of them presented in a balanced, admiring and non-mocking tone. In this and other similar situations, humour plays a powerful role. As anthropologists John Carty and Yasmine Musharbash suggest, ‘laughter is dangerous. Laughter is a boundary thrown up around those laughing, those sharing the joke. Its role in demarcating difference, of collectively identifying against an Other, is as bound to processes of social exclusion as to inclusion. Indeed, the two are one’.

Understanding the current status of WGS within the academy therefore requires an examination of humour. It requires analysing how humour makes it possible to maintain old prejudice in apparently modern and progressive institutions. It requires asking how it enables scholars to ridicule WGS in conferences, classrooms and corridors, while at the same time claim that they accept WGS and that the problem is feminists themselves, who ‘just don’t have a sense of humour’. It requires thinking of humour as something with powerful, and extremely problematic, social and political effects. It requires taking these powerful effects of academic humour very seriously indeed.

]]>https://sociologyatwarwick.wordpress.com/2014/03/21/dangerous-laughter-the-not-so-innocent-mocking-of-gender-studies-in-academia/feed/0alexttsmithUncomfortable positions in local governmenthttps://sociologyatwarwick.wordpress.com/2014/03/17/uncomfortable-positions-in-local-government/
https://sociologyatwarwick.wordpress.com/2014/03/17/uncomfortable-positions-in-local-government/#commentsMon, 17 Mar 2014 14:00:04 +0000http://sociologyatwarwick.wordpress.com/?p=1768]]>A new book by a Warwick sociologist, Negotiating Cohesion, Inequality and Change: Uncomfortable positions in local government, has been shortlisted by the British Sociological Association for this year’s Philip Abrams Memorial Prize. In a short post based on an extract from her introductory chapter, Hannah Jones explains what her book is about:

How are multiculturalism, inequality and belonging understood in the day-to-day thinking and practices of local government?

Working in policy and government can be uncomfortable. It can be uncomfortable to recognise inequalities of power and discrimination, to challenge these inequalities, and to find limitations on what can be changed. As someone working on policy, it can be uncomfortable to recognise that one is in a relatively privileged position compared to many of the people for whom one is working. People working in local government can think of their work to meet public needs as separate from their own personal lives. But, as I show in my book, they are often constantly aware that their own lives outside of work are bound up in what they do, and vice versa.

Examining original empirical data, my book explores how local government officers and politicians negotiate ‘difficult subjects’ linked with community cohesion policy, including diversity, inequality, discrimination, extremism, migration, religion, class, power and change. I argue that such work necessitates ‘uncomfortable positions’ when managing ethical, professional and political commitments. Based on first-hand experience of working in urban local government and extensive ethnographic, interview and documentary research, the book applies governmentality perspectives in a new way to consider how people working within government are subject to regimes of governmentality themselves. It also demonstrates how power operates through emotions.

My book examines these relationships through a focus on community cohesion policy in the UK. This is a set of ideas and interventions that became significant in England and Wales in 2001 in response to concerns about the fragmentation of society, particularly along ethnic lines. Its meaning is fluid and shifting, and context-specific, but it circulates with ideas about identity, belonging and local government in ways that are recognisable in policy discussions in other times and places.

Starting with the questions provoked by community cohesion policy is a way of getting at a number of different concerns – how identity and belonging are understood in (local) government; how individuals relate their own personal struggles to the broader institutions in which they are embedded; the importance of feeling and emotion in how policy operates; and how power and inequality interact with each of these concerns. Using community cohesion policy as a focus highlights the importance of shifting and unstable meanings in policy, and creates space to engage with larger themes including the nature of society, identity, inequality, migration and belonging.

On a final note, I would like to think that my book’s exploration of how ‘sociological imaginations’ are applied beyond academia will interest those arguing for the future of public services and building connections between the university and wider society. These would include scholars and students in sociology, social policy, social geography, urban studies and politics, and policy practitioners in local and central government.